Equity across time and space

I31

Equity is a really challenging thing, when you're dealing with equity...on a geographic scale. I'm drinking a coffee, obviously someone had to like pick the beans, and it is a fair trade coffee so I have that sense that I've purchased a product and I'm able to see the connection, at least tangentially understand, that there's ways and means to creating more equitable distributions, but again that's...just relying on some of the functions and features of capitalism to solve problems that are fundamentally being precipitated by [it]. And then equity across generations is an even more difficult thing, especially when you're talking about climate change because...the decisions we're making now are going to have an effect on our grandkids.

Leadership not dictatorship

I24

Things can happen awful fast sometimes...and [when it does happen] I think that the Left needs to...be...there to try and pick up the pieces and give it some coordination and leadership. Because I do believe in leadership, I just don't believe in the form of leadership that dictates to everybody what should happen. We've never really had a democracy.

Women, power, and winning

I26

It would be about women recognizing power, women understanding that they hold that power, and that they can exercise that power, and that exercising that power can change society, can change the individual, can change the family, can change the community, can change the society. And that would look not only like women recognizing and exercising that power but the society...recognizing that that power is valid.

Radical fetishes

I5

I think systemic mass movements are absolutely a priority if we want to change the world. I think political party activism, in the way that it exists in places like the global North, but I'd say also in the global South in many places, is a red herring that should be avoided. But I'd also say that about supposed forms of radicalism like primitivism, like deep ecology to a certain degree, like the idea that there's certain forms of radicality that are fetishes in and of themselves. Insurrectionists would do well, I think, to look back to the history of anarchism's propaganda of the deed which was very brief, and short lived, and bloody, and totally ineffective. You want to create an insurrectionary movement? Build a base and defend communities and move from there but you're not going to create revolution by throwing a firebomb.

Leadership and revolution

I23

...a belief in intrinsic spontaneity of the masses to be revolutionary without hard, slogging leadership….[is a] disease...

Activism and marginality

I9

Just looking at our immediate context right here in Halifax...looking at...the organizations that people have to fight through right now, the only ones that we see around us are these unions that right now are pretty backwards….[T]hey don't really fight anything except legal strikes which are almost nothing these days, small windows, pickets that aren't really challenging the company. I think for me it matters who is showing up, who are the people that are involving themselves and I'm seeing the activist community, a loose knit group of people involved in different NGOs in the city, people involved in student activism, that are showing up at all these different events but these aren't the actual body of workers that are out there. This isn't like a working class movement and if it's not a working class movement it doesn't really have the potential to transform conditions in our society.

Winning without utopia

I18

I really don't like utopian thinking because I really don't think if we were to beat back the forces of global capital that that would result in paradise on earth. I think there would still be a lot of challenge and struggle. But when I think about winning there would be a cap on how much any individual would be allowed to make, there would be a cap on how big any business [would be] allowed to be, there would be way more of a relationship between the [resource extraction and production processes] of any kind of industry….The people who live near that source, the people who extract that resource, the people who manufacture and do the labour producing that resource, and the whole shipping and distribution of that would be totally reformed to reflect sustainability and social justice, equality amongst workers.

Industrial civilization and root problems

I31

As long as we continue to be preoccupied with material consumption and economic growth that's based upon material consumption then we're just sort of pissing in the wind in terms of solving these problems. The fundamental root of the problem is an industrial growth model that is based upon this false premise that you can use resources within a human economy and that the only consequence of it is having to deal with the waste on the other side or having to find more resources to exploit. We're now encountering the point of pushing ecological thresholds beyond their finite capacity. So if that's the case then we need to reinvent the system so that it is one that is more aligned with what the finite ecological capacities of this planet are.

Managing dissent

I7

I think there's something to be said for keeping our internal struggles internal. Stephen Harper does that really well and that's not say again that we need to become authoritarian or hierarchical. It's just to say that if we're going to argue about whether we're libertarian or communist or something else we should not argue about that in the Chronicle Herald. We should not split our broader leftist movement apart publicly.

Imagination and living otherwise

I5

I think that the imagination is what animates really robust, resilient, dynamic social struggles. So in that way the radical imagination has to speak to how we [are] going to organize ourselves. How are we going to make sure, for instance, while we're busy imagining how our radical action is going to change the world that people with kids or with different abilities are going to be able to be a part of this? How are we going to meet the needs of people on the ground? How are we going to make sure that we have the resources to sustain people? How are we going to make sure that we protect each other from oppression whether internally or externally? And I think imagination has something to say to all those things and for me imagination is that. It's the social imagination of a people’s spirit to resist and live otherwise than they do right now.